Dialogue: Imitation is for also-rans

By MICHAEL SMYTHE*

Good news. The Herald has reported that an explosive new document provides the strongest indication yet that secret Team New Zealand designs may have been copied by rival syndicate OneWorld Challenge.

This is a great story for America's Cup publicists. The media will always rise to the bait of a good stoush. It is probably a sure-win regatta for a flotilla of lawyers. And it may be a clever way of intimidating the OneWorld designers.

But let's hope the Team New Zealand designers and sailors are treating it as an amusing sideshow which reinforces their role as leaders in their field.

Imitation is for me-too wannabes and also-rans. Copying the leader is great for those who are content to follow behind.

This is the approach that many New Zealand businesses have taken to international competitiveness. In today's business jargon, it is called benchmarking.

Benchmarking, says the American Productivity and Quality Centre, is "commonly misperceived" as industrial espionage. But it defends benchmarking as "a process of identifying, sharing and using knowledge and best practices".

The best working example I have experienced was when I worked at Fisher & Paykel in the 1960s. The development division workshop was full of imported appliances stripped down for analysis.

The engineering designers learned so much from so many examples of international "best practice" that the idea of copying just one would have been crazy. They learned what they could, then went back to first principles and reinvented the product they were working on.

The result, in engineering terms, was usually better that any imported product, at least in terms of suitability for the New Zealand market and scale of production.

This approach was fine when Fisher & Paykel operated in a protected local market. But in today's environment of strong competition in domestic and export markets, it is the unique, innovative products such as the Humidifier and the Dish Drawer that earn high profit margins.

(I do recall saying, as a design school graduate in 1967, that we should stop imitating Australians imitating American styling. I suggested that Italian design was beginning to lead the way because they were not imitating anyone. We needed to emulate their process, not imitate their outcomes.)

While there are lessons for New Zealand business in the America's Cup experience, there is at least one clear point of difference - businesses can succeed without being number one, but the cup is a zero sum game.

One way of succeeding in a winner-takes-all event is to aid your competitors to come second. One way of doing that is to let them try to imitate what you are doing.

There is a great precedent. In the 1970s, the Daily Mail sponsored a competition for a man-powered flying machine to travel a given distance forming a figure-eight path.

A British team used leading-edge computer science, programmed with known data, to create a theoretical model - the best possible design. They then spent thousands of hours building a balsa wood and tissue paper machine which lasted less than 10 seconds before crashing.

In the meantime, a Japanese team had realised that a laid-back, hands-on, trial-and-error Californian project, with an open-door policy, was making good progress.

The Americans were happy to let the Japanese photograph their aluminium tube, mylar film and duct-tape test-rigs and prototypes as they flew and failed. The time taken to analyse the evidence and attempt imitation, or even emulation, would ensure that the Japanese remained behind.

The American Gossamer Condor project went on to win. Nobody came second.

The British approach is an extreme example of time and energy going into a theoretical design which fails in practice. America's Cup teams that hire an expert to design a great machine for jockeys to ride err in that direction, especially if the input data is based on perceived best practice rather than personal or collective conviction.

By contrast, the Californian team used failing early and often as a design tool. Its similarity with the Team New Zealand process can be seen in the shared focus on actual performance, with any team member free to contribute.

Individual professional expertise is valued, but the synergy of the non-hierarchical team is also recognised.

Most important, final design decisions are made by the customers - the sailors - who must take ownership of the machine.

Tom Schnackenberg was a key player in the development of what Peter Mazany has called TeamThink. The fact that Schnackenberg now leads Team New Zealand means that the core philosophy and values of the successful 1995 and 2000 campaigns remain in spite of defections.

Perhaps Laurie Davidson, the expert and experienced hull designer, moved to OneWorld because he felt undervalued in the TeamThink environment; insulted that his professional gut-feel was not trusted; embarrassed at having to beg for the funds to test his (successful) concept.

Let's hope that Team New Zealand has learned useful lessons from its failure to retain such skill within its team.

The 2003 America's Cup regatta will be more that just a series of world-class yacht races. It will be our chance to compare leaders with followers, innovators with imitators and individual brilliance with team synergy.

My prediction is that creativity (that is, inventiveness and originality), developed through a rigorous trial-and-error process of innovation, in turn generating a powerful commitment and conviction among the end-users (sailors), will win the day.

And at the end of that day we may better understand what proportions of money, individual expertise, corporate culture and interdisciplinary teamwork have delivered the winning performances.

A successful Team New Zealand defence of the America's Cup would demonstrate once more that New Zealand can deliver world-beating performance because our small size, isolation and lack of access to megabucks make us more creative and cohesive.

And we will have learned once more that imitation is for losers.* Michael Smythe is a partner at Creationz Consultants, a design management, visual arts and cultural strategy consultancy.